Gerard Lemos Was Described by Community Care Magazine As ‘One of the UK’S Leading Thinkers on Social Policy’
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Gerard Lemos was described by Community Care magazine as ‘one of the UK’s leading thinkers on social policy’. His previous books include The End of the Chinese Dream: Why Chinese people fear the future published by Yale University Press and The Communities We Have Lost and Can Regain (with Michael Young). He has held many public appointments including as a Non-Executive Director of the Crown Prosecution Service. THE GOOD PRISON THE GOOD PRISONConsCIENCE, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Gerard Lemos First published in 2014 Lemos&Crane 64 Highgate High Street, London N6 5HX www.lemosandcrane.co.uk All rights reserved. Copyright ©Lemos&Crane 2014 The right of Gerard Lemos to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-898001-75-1 Designed by Tom Keates/Mick Keates Design Printed by Parish Print Consultants Limited Contents Foreword viii Introduction 1 Part One : Crime and Society 8 1. Conscience, family and community 8 2. Failure of conscience in childhood and early family experiences of offenders 19 3. The search for punishment 38 4. A transformed social consensus on crime and punishment since the 1970s 49 5. Justice and restoration 71 Part Two: The Good Prison 85 6. Managing the Good Prison 85 7. Family life of prisoners and opportunities for empathy 103 8. Mindfulness: reflection and collaboration 125 9. Creativity and artistic activity 152 10. Work, autonomy and well-being in prison and afterwards 170 11. Beyond prison: conscience and cash 189 Acknowledgements 205 Notes 206 Bibliography 217 Index 229 Bibliography 217 Foreword During his imprisonment, Vaclav Havel (the late President of Czech Republic) wrote to his wife Olga: ‘It’s interesting, though, that I never felt sorry for myself, as one might expect, but only for other prisoners and generally, for the fact that prison must exist and that they are as they are, and that mankind has not so far invented a better way of coming to terms with certain things.’ Yes, prisons must exist but society must do much more to offer meaningful rehabilitation and reduce reoffending. This thoughtful and sensitive book by Gerard Lemos recognises the challenges and difficulties but the concept of ‘a Conscience Compact’ and a holistic approach to rehabilitation, that is working on the inner aspects of a person as well as the circumstances of their life, offers an approach which is worthy of serious consideration and deserves wider debate. Baroness Usha Prashar of Runnymede Former Chairman of the Parole Board for England and Wales (1997–2000) viii Introduction The Monument Trust has put substantial sums of money into charities working in prisons for many years. This important work has been highly effective in giving prisoners a sense of meaning and purpose while in prison and then improving their life chances on release; work on literacy for example, or encouraging prisoners to write creatively or to take up painting and sculpture. Many charities funded by the Trust are small and only have financial and other resources to operate in a few prisons. As a result good work is often not widely known about even among prison governors and government officials. So projects which make a big difference find it difficult to operate across the majority of prisons. Good ideas struggle to travel. In 2006 the trustees of the Monument Trust enlisted Lemos&Crane’s help, with first establishing through research a framework of what might be considered a good idea likely to improve the prospects of prisoners and reduce the risks of them reoffending and, second, ensuring those in charge of running prisons and allocating financial resources knew about this good work. Since then I and my colleagues at Lemos&Crane have visited all sorts of prisons: those with a substantial proportion of inmates on remand; high security jails where the majority of prisoners are serving long sentences for serious and often violent offences; womens’ prisons; young offenders’ institutions; prisons in which many if not all prisoners are doubling up in cells creating a population nearly double the prison’s original capacity; prison wings for drug users or sex offenders; prisons run by the private as well as the public sector; those with many foreign prisoners in limbo, awaiting the decision of immigration 1 The Good Prison authorities about their fate or pending extradition back to jail in another country. I talked to many prisoners and staff working in and running prisons. I and my colleagues also spoke to hundreds of people who work with prisoners, in private, statutory and charitable services. The material we gathered was organised and published on the website PrisonerActionNet. Thousands of people working in prisons came together into a network, to meet online and at seminars and conferences to talk about their work and share ideas. As we had hoped, some of the best transmissions between them were informal. Liberal critics of prisons set out a litany of shortcomings: inhumane living conditions; short disruptive sentences with little evidence of corrective impact or benefit; overcrowding however rapidly new prisons are built; poor conduct of prison staff; lack of meaningful activities; hours on end spent locked behind cell doors; poor educational opportunities and preparation for work; inadequate services for prisoners with mental health problems; frequent suicide attempts which defy surveillance; offenders stuck in prison having completed their sentences awaiting decisions about asylum, deportation or extradition. From the other end of the political spectrum prisons are regarded as a soft touch for the feckless, their punitive rigour undermined by bogus liberal, 1960s, psychoanalytic philosophising. From this point of view prisons are seen as too comfortable by half and a long way short of punitive enough to be an experience sufficiently horrific to act as a deterrent against future criminality. But the most pervasive and persistent contemporary criticism from all sides of the debate is the failure of imprisonment, in a large proportion of cases, to prevent reoffending. The recidivism rate is all too readily ascribed to the shortcomings of the prison regime. My own impression of life in prisons is rather different to these critical perspectives. I have encountered many well-meaning, talented and dedicated staff among ordinary, front-line prison officers; many innovative, original ways of working with prisoners; good quality education from highly motivated teachers, some of whom are genuinely inspiring – for many prisoners this might be the first decent education they have had. They had either entirely failed to participate first time around (the quality of the education itself was simply poor) or their particular educational needs had not been met by conventional education undertaken in large classes. A plethora of humane and fascinating work is undertaken by charities (some of which I shall describe later). The medical staff are committed to helping some of the most troubled and alienated people imaginable. The approach of many chaplains to religious belief is humble and compassionate, profound and infused with the capacity to enrich 2 Introduction these outsiders with the feeling of belonging through spirituality. In one prison I was pleasantly surprised to meet a pagan chaplain who cheerfully introduced herself, ‘I’m the witch of the west. Anyway, I must go now…’ Despite many complaints about prison food one of my more implausible impressions of prison life is of the excellent quality of some prison food, almost always cooked by the prisoners themselves working for £12 a week. No one who walks around prison grounds can fail to be assailed by the often delightful traditional cooking smells that suffuse the immediate surrounding atmosphere of the kitchen block. If, like me, you ate school dinners with relish, walking past a prison kitchen block is a Proustian moment; an olfactory remembrance of times – and food – past, complete with the drone of industrial extractor fans for sound effect. Speaking as a connoisseur of fish and chips, I can confirm that the best plate of fish and chips I have ever eaten was cooked by prisoners in the staff canteen at H.M. Prison Parc. Another implausible experience, this time of beauty, was the remarkable landscaping of the prison garden at H.M. Prison Brinsford. The day I visited, the high fences topped with rolled barbed wire and the endless, featureless prison walls seemed to touch a leaden grey sky, which would disgorge a great weight of snow later the same day. Prison grounds can be bleak prairies of litter and neglect. Not for nothing are some parts of prison grounds called ‘sterile areas’. As well as being sterile for security purposes they are aesthetically sterile. Not this one. In between the forbidding blocks of the prison the grounds had been laid out with a modernist, architectural flair. Behind low, square box hedges, thin, tall grasses of many types swayed and bent in the icy wind. No attempt was made to soften the sharp corners of the prison buildings with a ‘wild’ English-style planting scheme; no sign of low maintenance ground cover much favoured by unimaginative municipal authorities. Instead the angular plants brought the looming, dark buildings into an accentuated, geometrical abstraction. From the offender’s perspective, the prison sentence begins with a short and unpleasant period of induction. The new prisoner’s former life of community citizenship is stripped from them and they must adjust to new and highly constrained, standardised surroundings and conditions. The requirements and rules and the need to comply with them could not be made clearer. Similarly the conditions and benefits of achieving enhanced status are clearly spelled out.